Twenty-five years have passed since that day. And like few other days, its memory is still pretty fresh in my mind. Where I was when the news first came across my car radio — driving my daughter to her early college class. My initial reaction — is this a joke, a spoof, a “The War of the Worlds” type of thing (a 1938 radio broadcast reporting a real-time invasion by Martians)?

Then, walking into the office, seeing no one at their desks, finding everyone gathered around a television in the conference room, looking at two burning skyscrapers in disbelief as film that had captured the planes hitting the buildings was played, and replayed, and replayed again, and played again and again and again. Then watching the buildings fall. Could we have imagined anything more horrific? Anything more calamitous. I don’t think so.

Maybe this day is part of why this truth pops from the page.

“I am the LORD, and there is no other,
       besides Me there is no God;
       I equip you, though you do not know Me,
that people may know, from the rising of the sun
       and from the west, that there is none besides Me;
       I am the LORD, and there is no other.
I form light and create darkness,
       I make well-being and create calamity,
       I am the LORD, who does all these things.”

(Isaiah 45:5-7 ESV)

I make well-being and create calamity . . . Chew on that!

“I bring prosperity and create disaster” (NIV). “I send good times and bad times” (NLT). “Making peace and preparing evil” (Young’s Literal).

Hmm . . . When I hear “God created”, what initially pops in my head is “And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1). But what about 9/11? If I’m picking up what God through Isaiah is laying down, then God “created” that too. It’s kind of the logical implication of believing that our God is the sovereign God — a God over everything, an engaged God, a God who directs the steps of men and has ordained the course of history. But it’s kind of a hard implication to swallow sometimes, isn’t it? That He is the LORD who does all these things.

Cue faith. Cue trusting in the LORD with all your heart (Prov. 3:5a). Cue putting calamity in the context of a God who is good rather than questioning the goodness of God in the face of calamity.

And we don’t need the commemoration of 9/11 to cue such responses. There’s more than enough calamity in our world today — both the world at large and our personal worlds — to cause us to wrestle with the reality of a God who tells us I am the LORD who does all these things.

And so, we pause. We remember. We wonder. And we resolve, by His enabling, to walk by faith and not by sight (2Cor. 5:7). To trust in the LORD and lean not to our own understanding (Prov. 3:5b). To rest in the goodness of God even as we are surrounded by calamity in our world.

Only by His grace. Always for His glory.